Shiny things
Jan. 9th, 2020 09:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cahnI mentioned to karanguni on a post about crafting that (once when I had free time?) I play(ed) with blender to model jewelry that I then get Shapeways to print in metal, and she asked me if I had pics. (Tangentially, how do people get their pictures on DW? Is there a way I can do this easily directly from my phone? (I don't consider emailing it "easily."))
So... I started doing this because I really, really like gemstones. I have a bunch of (usually small, often synthetic and cheap, I'm not picky about provenance but SUPER picky about things like color and cut) stones and wanted to set them but I also have particular ideas about how to set them.
Here are four years' worth of playing with blender. (Not that I have 4 years worth of experience.. .it's more like one month of experience repeated a bunch of times... "play with it for a month, order some stuff, forget about it for a year, get reminded I like making shiny things, realize I've forgotten everything I know about blender, rinse and repeat.") I used the JewelCraft addon for almost all of these. Probably used other addons but that was the main one.
There is more but this was the stuff that was in my jewelry box.
Left: a brass (4,1) torus knot. (That means it goes around the torus four times "around the long way" and once "around the short way," if that makes sense.) It also was really easy to make, as blender tools has this built in, and looks really cool, I think. (ETA: I was reminded by comments that I should say this is not my original idea; I saw someone else do something similar and thought, hey, I could easily make that too!) Inside is a 5mm lab ruby sphere that can revolve freely, so it is very satisfying as kinetic jewelry (I wear it as a pendant with the chain looped through the middle). This is a terrible picture; it looks much better than this!
Center: Silver pendant for a cubic zirconia I had custom cut. I'm really pleased with how this one turned out.
Right: Pendant that was SUPPOSED to have garnets in the three places between the branches. Not happy about this one. I didn't make the stone prongs long enough and the garnets don't fit. I may buy some cheap lab rubies that are slightly smaller and set those instead, ugh because the whole point was to use up the garnets.
Left: Ring holding a color-change garnet. These are the coolest stones ever: purple in incandescent/halogen light, and bluish-green in daylight. SO COOL. Style is mimicking an etsy artist who no longer takes commissions on etsy (if she still did, I'd probably have got her to do this).
Center: yellow cz, this was a "tension"-esque setting (I'll show you the side in another pic). This was an interesting experiment but I don't think I'd do it again; it took forever to wedge the stone in I'm also unsure as to how stable it is.
Right: Plastic ring with a red spinel in it, I haven't printed this in silver yet.
Side views of the yellow cz and red spinel ring. You can see the yellow one came out kind of lumpy. This has to do with my using the blender "skin" modifier which sometimes gets confused. But anyway you can see that it's held in place by tension (although this is not what is called a true "tension" setting because of the bar underneath).
Bracelet I was working on a couple months ago but never got around to fixing. Stone is a precision cut garnet. This one I have to change to make the lines of it a bit less lumpy and also make it a bit bigger on my wrist.
The ring I started originally working in blender to make. Blue cz. This went through 11 iterations in plastic and a couple in silver (the other silver ones are holding other stones now). Many of the iterations were very very similar, I just... want things exactly so, sometimes.
karanguni on a post about crafting that (once when I had free time?) I play(ed) with blender to model jewelry that I then get Shapeways to print in metal, and she asked me if I had pics. (Tangentially, how do people get their pictures on DW? Is there a way I can do this easily directly from my phone? (I don't consider emailing it "easily."))So... I started doing this because I really, really like gemstones. I have a bunch of (usually small, often synthetic and cheap, I'm not picky about provenance but SUPER picky about things like color and cut) stones and wanted to set them but I also have particular ideas about how to set them.
Here are four years' worth of playing with blender. (Not that I have 4 years worth of experience.. .it's more like one month of experience repeated a bunch of times... "play with it for a month, order some stuff, forget about it for a year, get reminded I like making shiny things, realize I've forgotten everything I know about blender, rinse and repeat.") I used the JewelCraft addon for almost all of these. Probably used other addons but that was the main one.
There is more but this was the stuff that was in my jewelry box.
Left: a brass (4,1) torus knot. (That means it goes around the torus four times "around the long way" and once "around the short way," if that makes sense.) It also was really easy to make, as blender tools has this built in, and looks really cool, I think. (ETA: I was reminded by comments that I should say this is not my original idea; I saw someone else do something similar and thought, hey, I could easily make that too!) Inside is a 5mm lab ruby sphere that can revolve freely, so it is very satisfying as kinetic jewelry (I wear it as a pendant with the chain looped through the middle). This is a terrible picture; it looks much better than this!
Center: Silver pendant for a cubic zirconia I had custom cut. I'm really pleased with how this one turned out.
Right: Pendant that was SUPPOSED to have garnets in the three places between the branches. Not happy about this one. I didn't make the stone prongs long enough and the garnets don't fit. I may buy some cheap lab rubies that are slightly smaller and set those instead, ugh because the whole point was to use up the garnets.
Left: Ring holding a color-change garnet. These are the coolest stones ever: purple in incandescent/halogen light, and bluish-green in daylight. SO COOL. Style is mimicking an etsy artist who no longer takes commissions on etsy (if she still did, I'd probably have got her to do this).
Center: yellow cz, this was a "tension"-esque setting (I'll show you the side in another pic). This was an interesting experiment but I don't think I'd do it again; it took forever to wedge the stone in I'm also unsure as to how stable it is.
Right: Plastic ring with a red spinel in it, I haven't printed this in silver yet.
Side views of the yellow cz and red spinel ring. You can see the yellow one came out kind of lumpy. This has to do with my using the blender "skin" modifier which sometimes gets confused. But anyway you can see that it's held in place by tension (although this is not what is called a true "tension" setting because of the bar underneath).
Bracelet I was working on a couple months ago but never got around to fixing. Stone is a precision cut garnet. This one I have to change to make the lines of it a bit less lumpy and also make it a bit bigger on my wrist.
The ring I started originally working in blender to make. Blue cz. This went through 11 iterations in plastic and a couple in silver (the other silver ones are holding other stones now). Many of the iterations were very very similar, I just... want things exactly so, sometimes.
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Date: 2020-01-10 11:16 pm (UTC)Upload to Flickr or Imgur, use their embed code.
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Date: 2020-01-13 05:28 pm (UTC)